Days before blasting comedian Michelle Wolf for her “filthy” jokes about his administration at the White House Correspondents Dinner, President Trump played host to a radio personality who has claimed that Democrats want to “enslave” white people and once lost a television program after he called a caller a “sodomist” and told him he should “get AIDS and die.”
As we’ve mentioned, far-right radio host Michael Savage scored a meeting with Trump in the Oval Office last week, which he said lasted 30 minutes. He also tweeted a photo of himself meeting with Vice President Mike Pence and said that he was at the state luncheon honoring French President Emmanuel Macron.
Last year, Savage claimed that he spent “over an hour” speaking with Trump in a visit to the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Trump appeared a number of times on Savage’s nationally syndicated radio show during his presidential campaign, where he speculated that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had been murdered, wondered why many Jewish people supported Barack Obama, boasted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had called him “a genius,” called for “tremendous surveillance” of mosques, claimed that immigrants are often “not well people” and assured his supporters that he had no plans to moderate his message.
Trump praised Savage, telling him that “you are doing a great job and you’ve been loyal to me from the beginning,” and Savage suggested that he join the Trump administration to run the National Institutes of Health or a new version of the House Un-American Activities committee to investigate “subversive” progressive groups.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Savage has apparently been welcomed with open arms by the Trump White House, despite his long history of promoting conspiracy theories and bigotry.
Shortly after the 2016 election, Savage rejoiced on his radio program that Trump’s victory had delivered the white children of America from certain slavery:
“I don’t walk around fearing that it’s all coming to an end. I don’t walk around looking at little white children seeing future slaves anymore. Did you know that? Did you know that that’s what I used to see? I’d walk around and look at little white children and I’d shake my head and I’d say, ‘If this doesn’t stop, these children will be slaves in their own nation.’”
Savage once called former Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine “a vampire who hates his own race” and “wants to enslave you by turning you into a minority in your own country” and accused President Obama of stirring up a “race war” and overseeing a “genocide” of white people.
Just last year, Savage cited a white nationalist website to warn of the risk of anti-Trump violence.
Media Matters notes that Savage has “called autism ‘a fraud’ and ‘a racket’; said people with PTSD and depression are ‘losers’; advised people not to get flu shots because you can't trust the government; theorized that liberals have been driven insane because of seltzer bubbles; and claimed that the ‘asthma epidemic amongst minority children’ is actually ‘a money racket’ because ‘the children got extra welfare if they were disabled.’ Like President Trump, Savage believes that manmade climate change is a ‘scam’ and a hoax.”
Ranting on his radio program in 2014, Savage called veterans with PTSD a “bunch of losers”:
Savage lost a short-lived MSNBC program in 2003 after he told a caller:
"Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today -- go eat a sausage and choke on it. Get trichinosis."
